04.3.2018 Realtime Particles

04.3.2018
Kilian Mehringer
Developer

After 18 weeks of weekly renders i have something different for this weeks render. Its not done in Blender or Fusion. Its not raytraced, has no vertecies, splines or polygons. Its written completely from scratch in processing.

Processing is a java based programming language for realtime image processing or generation. It comes with alot of handy features to make realtime graphics easy to use.
Its the perfect way to get fast visual feedback of what your coding. It implements libarys like openCV wich is an open source computer vision libary.
Everything processing provides is very highlevel and easy to access, wich makes it perfect for qick data visualisation and other usefull tasks. But its also great for creating some cool interactive art stuff, and makes alot of fun.

What you can see in this weeks render is a simple particle System every particle has a location a direction and an acceleration vector in 2d space. The mouse cursor spans new paerticles wich at first follow there randomly generated direction and with every tick there acceleration vector gets added on to it. And that everything i did. Took me not more than 20mins to code it down without knowing processing before. Its that simple.

Sure i did some more stuff afterwards including computer vision, face detection and stuff like this, wich is a bit more complex. But it was still far more easy than it would be to do in pure java or python, where you need to choose a libary to write your gui in first and write a lot of basic methods by yourself or duct tape a lot of other libarys together before you can start to work on your real project or idea you wanted to try out.

All in all i can say its alot of fun and im sure i will do some more cool stuff with it in the future if i have the time for it. Even when its not quite what this series is for.

WIREFRAME 3D MODEL

FINAL SHADED RENDER